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I’m super-psyched to announce our latest release of Beacontrol, v1.0.1. What makes a .0.1 release exciting? We added a feature that lets you select a proximity for triggering your beacon notifications. It’s a simple dropdown that looks like this:

meltmedia has always believed in Open-source Software [OSS] and giving back to the community. We’re releasing a number of our internal projects as OSS and we’ll announce those moves here as they take place.

Any time you need to move sensitive data, such as keys and passphrases, from one place to another through systems or networks you do not control, you need to encrypt it. You don’t want that sensitive data to be snooped on by unauthorized eyes. Our team has written some slick libraries for Java and Node.js that make that task easier.

Totem is meltmedia’s solution for Continuous Deployment (CD). If you’d like to learn more about CD and how Totem handles that workflow, go get some background in this previous article. If you’re ready to dive into how Totem can work in an enterprise setting, read on!

Totem is more than an automated workflow that takes your code, builds it, and sends it to a server for execution. It eliminates all sorts of problems enterprise IT teams face every day and pulls people out of day-to-day administrative and support tasks. It provides a single source of truth for infrastructure, developer, quality assurance, database, product management, project management, and support teams. It reduces deployment and infrastructure costs, saves time, centralizes logging, and also makes waffle fries!

In a former life, I managed a team of application administrators at a company I’ll call, Very Large Enterprise Company. Our job was to deploy applications to all the various servers for a couple dozen internet-based products. We were the team that took down the application in the middle of a Friday or Saturday night, made changes on servers in various data centers and worked with database and system administrators as they made their changes, etc.

Google also announced that they are now using information from indexed apps on your devices, for ranking when you’re signed into their services. Here’s a link to a step-by-step guide on how to get your app indexed: App Indexing for Google Search.

Heads up! It’s about to get deep in here, in a technical way. So if you’re into topics like Continuous Deployment, read on. If not, please share this article with your favorite geeks.

Despite our 60-ish team members and 15-year history, meltmedia faces a lot of the same problems as many other technology organizations. We have a distinct advantage though: We can move quickly to fix these problems with new tech and innovative ideas. Following is an example…

In August 2013, we (some present and past meltmedians) launched a website called WhyAZ in an effort to attract and keep great tech/business/design talent in Arizona. The site went viral and we received tons of visitors and shares. The excitement around WhyAZ was great, but there was no reason to return to the site because content updates were few and far between. Additionally, WhyAZ employs use of fancy new stylesheet technology to draw all the images dynamically instead of a standard image file. This makes development and updates less trivial.

After the launch, we saw lots of success with the #whyaz hashtag on Twitter. We realized that the best way to capture this magic was to incorporate it directly into the site. I spoke with Jake Heun, one of our Senior Front End Developers, and asked for some detail around how and why the changes came about.

Good news music fans! We’ve released a children’s music app, Moozart. Well, we released it in 2010 and thousands of people paid to download it, BUT, thanks to changes in iOS over the years, a few new bugs needed to be worked out.
For the holidays, we’ve released an update to Moozart that fixes audio issues on iOS 8, provides retina graphics, stops intermittent crashes some people have encountered, provides stereo audio, and has better music. And we are now offering it for free! Get it now in the App Store.

After a few years of evolving beacon technology, hardware providers are introducing a new generation of products into the marketplace. Estimote is doing this with Estimote Stickers, complementary to their standard beacons. Stickers contain an accelerometer, temperature sensors and an optimized ARM processor (with flash memory and a Bluetooth Smart controller). This is all inside a significantly smaller and thinner form factor. These stickers are designed to be placed on everyday objects, which brings us to the Estimote coined term, “nearable.”

By attaching a Sticker to an item, it turns into a nearable – a smart, connected object that broadcasts data about its location, motion and temperature. Estimote defines a nearable as an intelligent object linked by a smart beacon, with a rich SDK, to the cloud.

Join this week’s “Introducing Nearables” TweetChat, #iBeaconChat#nearables, with Estimote’s Roshan Prakash (Business Operations Manager) and Wojciech Borowicz (Community Evangelist) as we discuss why nearables matter and what they can do for you.

We’ve been talking to lots of people about beacons these past few months. There’s a ton of interest from local businesses of every size who have quickly recognized the power of connecting real-world users and environments with apps on smartphones and tablets. Our conversations often lead to impromptu brainstorming sessions as business owners think of ideas to incorporate beacons into their marketing mix.

But, there’s one question we always bring to the table, and sometimes it stops ideas in their tracks: “How is this idea good for your customers?”

Nearly half the company’s employees are technical and actively develop code. We don’t outsource any of our technology needs because we have plenty of expertise in our Tempe, AZ offices. We don’t call ourselves a “Java shop” or a “.Net shop” because we know how to make use of the best technology for any solution regardless of what language or platform is popular at the time.

We are a company of passionate people. Over the past year, we’ve focused our passion on the practice of automation. The following quote is of great significance and inspiration to us:

As you read this, Apple has already deployed iBeacons (referred to from here on as, “Beacons”) in its US stores. shopkick is testing its own Beacons in New York and San Francisco. A number of Beacon vendors are shipping their own versions of Beacon hardware to developers (we have several in-hand here at meltmedia). The buzz started when a slide at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference listed the term, “iBeacons” among a myriad of other technologies being introduced there. Once the industry figured out what the term meant, it went all giddy about Beacons and for good reason.